After threatening to hack jihadist websites, the group vows a clean-up of dark web in the wake of Westminster Child Abuse

Anonymous internet collective, a group well-known for attacking corporate and government websites, is again in news and this time it is planning to expose international Pedophile networks. Anonymous’ project is partly prompted by the contentions of cover-up of the suspected 1980s Westminster Pedophile ring as well as the emergence of new questions regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s influence network. Epstein, a billionaire financier and Prince Andrew’s friend, was convicted of sex offenses.

Popularity of smartphone, capability of the internet to let child-abusers form self-supporting groups and ubiquity of ‘regular’ pornography has accelerated the child porn issue massively in recent times. “Peer-to-Peer” file sharing networks are used by Pedophile for sharing the images. This type of network enables swapping of pictures and video files between two people via an encrypted network that ensures that the users don’t get detected.

One of the leading experts in the effects of Child Sex abuse, Dr. Sharon Cooper, has been reviewing the images of child abuse since 1998 and believes that these have suddenly turned more sadistic.

Dr. Cooper states: “In the late 1990s a lot of images were poses, children just solo or perhaps masturbating, but not nearly as horrendous as what we see today, which is child-torture. Sometimes it’s so bad you cannot be sure they will survive it.”

“Many of these child abuse images are also mimicking adult porn which has become much more violent, often contains more than one offender and includes many more homemade images. That is occurring in child sexual abuse images too.”

Operation Death Eaters–

After the hurtful Westminster child abuse controversy and the government’s alleged attempts to cover it up, the Anonymous group is enraged. It has now openly issued a call for worldwide effort to initiate a campaign for building grassroots databases of all paedophile cases. The campaign has been named as “Operation Death Eaters” after the famous Harry Potter series’ evil acolytes of Lord Voldemort. Anonymous believes that this campaign will help in highlighting the issue to the darkest corners of the World Wide Web.

This campaign has been launched right after Anonymous announced its plans to attack jihadist websites post Charlie Hebdo killings.

Anonymous is spreading information throughout social media including Facebook and Twitter, etc., about this campaign using the OpDeathEaters hashtag.

Heather Marsh, who is an online activist and “old friend” of Anonymous, is coordinating with the group in this operation. Miss Marsh, states that OpDeathEaters aims to expose the level of the sudden outburst of child abuse content on the internet.

The core idea behind this operation is to expose the extent of complicity, cover-ups and impediment of justice in the paedo-sadist industry. It is an attempt to highlight the “need for independent inquiries,” says Miss Marsh.

Just like the previous campaign from Anonymous during which the hacker group highlighted the covering-up of the ritual killings in Gabon, an African state, OpDeathEaters will try to break the conspiracy of silence within sympathetic yet unapologetic politicians, police and local media. Anonymous believes that these are entities that have played a prominent role in downplaying the severity of online child pornography issue.

Miss Marsh further added that:

“The database is not meant to find criminals but to show influence networks and how already known cases are distributed across those networks. No one can visualize a beach by being presented with periodic, isolated grains of sand.”

The Anonymous database:

The database will be hosted on the GitHub online depository and it promises to gather information about cases from all over the world. Additionally, it will have information about the cross-referencing connections within subsidiary groups such as the armed forces, police, politicians, schoolteachers, mainstream media, academics and religious institutions

The actual purpose that this database will serve is yet to be revealed and/or determined however, the group maintains that it wants to completely eliminate the child pornography industry by “dismantling the power structure which held it there and educating to create a cultural change”.

The Gravity and Scale of Online Child Pornography:

Experts warn that the images of child abuse available on the internet are not in hundreds or thousands buts tens of millions and many even show abuse of newborns and toddlers. This is definitely an alarming state since mainstream media and public both have turned a blind eye to this grave issue.

What’s even more disturbing is the fact that offenders are often caught very late and are glossed over by local media as it is always eager for new disturbing details. For instance, in Washington prominent Republican fund-raiser Michael Centanni was found with 267 child abuse videos after which he pleaded guilty this month to serious child felonies.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in Washington DC only offers a fraction of the total data. It has since 2002 identified 8,000 child victims and 3.2million images of child pornography. However, approx. 40,000 images are being uploaded every single week.

US law enforcement authorities, states Detective Cecil Arnold, have identified more than seven million images of child abuse and just about 40% of these are specifically being tracked.

According to Det. Arnold, a Texas Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force member, the most disturbing fact is that about 60% of the latest such images that have been reviewed by ICAC involve pre-pubescent kids (infants, toddlers and children under 10 years of age). This revelation has nullified the widespread belief that mainly pubescent and teenage boys and girls were involved in child pornography.

David Cameron firstly acknowledged the scale of this issue previous year after he announced the “We Protect” initiative, which demanded inclusion of new felonies for asking children pictures and a fresh unit at GCHQ/police to track the encrypted file-sharing links used by abusers for swapping pictures and videos of child abuse.

In December last year while addressing an International Conference, Mr Cameron notified about the transferring of “sickening images” on the ostensible dark web. He also issued a warning to Pedophile that there “would be nowhere to hide” since the intelligence agencies are good at lighting-up the darkest corners of the web.

Conversely, Miss Marsh, who also wrote book “Blinding Chaos” about the power of international grassroots networks to displace traditional government, states that it is the government instead of grassroots’ responsibility to own the process.

She added:

“The high level cover-ups by the UK government would make one question the good faith of any of their initiatives to shut down the industry.”

Waqas Amir is a Milan-based cybersecurity journalist with a passion for covering latest happenings in cyber security and tech world. In addition to being the founder of this website, Waqas is also into gaming, reading and investigative journalism.

HACKREAD is a News Platform that centers on InfoSec, Cyber Crime, Privacy, Surveillance and Hacking News with full-scale reviews on Social Media Platforms & Technology trends. Founded in 2011, HackRead is based in Milan, Italy.